What was unsavory about Night of the Juggler when it was originally released in 1980 — the image of New York City as a hellhole of violence, degenerates, social inequality, and political corruption (all subsumed in the adjective “gritty”) — is now key to the film’s new reputation.

The marketing for Night of the Juggler’s 4K restoration and re-release includes an endorsement from Sean Baker, the Oscar-winning director of Anora: “Big fan of this film having seen it numerous times.” No kidding. Every character, from former cop Sean Boyd (James Brolin), whose daughter was kidnapped by maniac Gus Soltic (Cliff Gorman), to the harried cops and denizens encountered during the chase, resemble low-lifes in Baker’s hipster films.

Seen 45 years later, Night of the Juggler still conveys the worst of New York’s big-city ugliness, only now it’s behavior that a progressive like Baker idealizes in his tales of our fraught and fragmented condition.

Brolin’s Boyd pursues his own doppelganger in Soltic — the exhausted, middle-class law-bringer and the psychotic racist from the underclass who vows, “Now they’re going to pay. I’m going to be the juggler, juggling the books!” These exiles from proper society must contend with circumstances that define their troubled identity — the same issues common to Baker’s usual cast of transsexuals, criminals, hustlers, and prostitutes.

There’s a direct connection to Boyd’s teenage daughter, Kathy (Abby Bluestone), an androgynous teenager who dresses in gender-obscuring overalls. (“You’re just like your old man,” Boyd tells her.) Inevitably, Boyd’s chase goes from Central Park, where the abduction occurs, to the blasted wasteland of the South Bronx (just before hip-hop made decay seem exotic). It’s Sean Baker territory with a showy centerpiece in the sleazy porn emporiums of Times Square. Director Robert Butler films these sequences for shocking verisimilitude. His audacious staging — a peep show-and-interrogation that combines multilevel stories of individual, amoral desperation — rivals the urban spectacles of The French Connection, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and The Warriors, combined with the Big Apple tourism of Larry Cohen, Abel Ferrara, and Sidney Lumet.

Night of the Juggler is a psychological thriller that uses realism to document civic rot. Richard Castellano (Clemenza in The Godfather) plays Lt. Tonelli, an everyman, first-hand witness to various urban crises — from the Puerto Rican FALN terrorists to politically connected Upper East Side elites. (“I deal with murderers, rapists, thieves, creeps of all kind. They don’t scare me. You scare me.”)

In this town, everybody’s got a grievance, and corruption is commonplace. The nightmare vision in Night of the Juggler was scripted by Burt Reynolds’s action adept William W. Norton from a novel by William P. McGivern, whose writing was also the basis of Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, from 1953. (If Baker hasn’t noticed Lang’s gay subtext, it’s because it’s less important than Lang’s greater moral clarity.) Boyd exposed a dirty cop then quit the force, and his ex-wife resents it. “What was so wrong if a couple of cops made some extra money? Everybody makes a little extra money!” she scolds. And this foul reasoning inflames Sgt. Barnes (Dan Hedaya), whose personal enmity propels the movie into the absurdist stratosphere — Brolin, Gorman, and Hedaya split one B-movie personality, derived from Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders and Paddy Chayefsky’s The Hospital.

It took the ’90s indie-film movement to make the subcultural perspectives in Night of the Juggler seem generic — and contemporary. The film has returned as proof of our eternal social ills but — and this is what distinguishes it — without using political identity as an excuse. Some see crisis as identity, but Night of the Juggler avoids the dishonest sentimental juggling that morons condone in Sean Baker’s more fashionable movies.